


the river never reaches the sea

by gogollescent



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-26
Updated: 2013-07-26
Packaged: 2017-12-21 11:13:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/899616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"You want to comb my hair?"</i>
</p><p>In which both Margaery and Cersei develop a fascination with Sansa's fiery tresses, and Sansa gets the gift of prophecy. Kind of. (No.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the river never reaches the sea

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place a few days before the Red Wedding in ASoS's chronology. I dithered over the timing for ages, so now you get to hear about it.

There came a day not long after her marriage when she and Margaery crossed paths again. Margaery hadn't spoken to her since the wedding, and Sansa didn't seek her out. But she often waited on the queen, and once Cersei summoned Sansa to the same solar where she and Margaery were finishing an early supper.

“Ah, Sansa,” she said, when Sansa had closed the door. “It must have taken my armsmen more time than usual to find you. I'll have the cooks send up another helping. There's one already coming for Lady Margaery.”

“Thank you, but there's no need,” said Sansa. She hesitated, and lied. “My husband and I always sup together.”

“I understand,” said the queen.

She rose from her chair in a cascade of Myrish lace. Margaery remained seated, wearing a smile that she directed half at Sansa and half at Cersei's back. It should have been conspiratorial, even sweet—but coming as it did on the heels of long cold, it seemed rather to scald Sansa in its light intimacy.

Cersei smiled too; and the expression, held apart from all that Sansa knew, was still not gentle.

“You look tired,” she said, pouring Sansa a cup of Arbor wine. “Does my little brother keep you up these long nights?” Behind her Margaery let loose a gust of surprised laughter. Cersei's grip on the pitcher tightened.

“He has been very kind,” Sansa said.

“It occurs to me that we are sisters now,” Cersei said. She sounded as if she were quoting someone. Margaery, Sansa thought, but it couldn't be. “To think you nearly made yourself my daughter—though you're young enough for it. But not, I know, too young to be a good wife to Tyrion.”

She moved to recline in the curve of the window seat, and patted the unoccupied space by her outstretched knee until Sansa could do nothing but join her. In the brilliance of the bay window her eyes were yellow as a beech tree's autumn leafing. She wasn't looking at Sansa, or anything in the room; her gaze had shifted to the fine view of the Keep—in fact to the courtyard at the foot of her tower, where armed men came in and out of dark doorways and servant women carried loads of washing across uneven flagstones, balancing carefully on narrow shoes.

“We are all almost family here,” said Margaery. “Though I hope, Sansa, that you'll forgive me, if I forget to call you aunt. I have grown to like giving you your name too much.”

“Then don't stop,” said Sansa absently. She meant no accusation by it; in her unease at Cersei's questioning she had forgotten, more or less, who was their witness. But she saw Margaery wince.

“I remember another occasion when I called you here,” said Cersei. “You'd just flowered.” The frankness in her voice made Sansa tremble where once she would have blushed. “You were disappointed, I believe. You said it should have been magical.”

“More magical,” said Sansa, who remembered that day as well.

“More? Was it slightly?”

Sansa thought of the bloody bedding she had burned in desperation—the stinking smoke that had filled her bedroom and blotted out the ghostly shafts of morning sun. The nightmare that preceded it: knives stuck in her like flags stuck in a map. “I was a silly girl.”

“Oh, you mustn't say that,” said Margaery. “First blood—when mine came I cried for hours, and even my grandmother couldn't console me.” She gave her upturned hands a deprecating glance; picturing, Sansa supposed, how they'd looked smeared with crimson. Then she reached for the goblet at her elbow, and drank deep. “I thought I was dying, or part of me was dying. The part that never wanted to leave Highgarden.”

“How nice,” said Cersei irritably. Her attention had settled back on Sansa, like the returning tide. “That day in this chamber... you wouldn't eat. And now, of course, you dine at your husband's table. Tell me, Sansa, how is his kindness? Messy? _Magical_?”

Margaery, in the background, choked on her wine. Sansa's mind went blank. “Forgive me, Your Grace,” she said. “I don't—”

“Has the Imp impressed?” said Cersei. “Does he do his duty? May we, Seven permitting, expect an heir?”

Sansa flinched.

“Ah,” said Cersei. In amusement her eyes slanted upward, like Tyrion's when he grinned: slitted by mirth, they were as black as green. It was always strange that she could resemble him, and be lovely. “I see I will soon have someone to call _me_ aunt.”

That surprised Sansa. She hadn't known it was possible to be so afraid without betraying herself. Or perhaps Cersei knew the truth, and was pretending otherwise because she found it funny: Sansa's horror and the Imp's restraint, and the maids at dawn checking for any hint of a stain—all of it funny, funny, funny, and the queen alone to laugh. “I will pray for a son,” said Sansa, above her rising gorge. _They should have taken me to Highgarden. I could have named him Robb._

She turned her face from Margaery then, but it made no difference: much as Cersei would have hated to believe it, Margaery was everywhere in the room, the evidence of her on the empty plates and the laid table, and the serving maid on the stair, who was carrying up a tray of venison for the Queen Regent's more honored guest: and outside, in the city, it was unimaginably worse. Not that she could blame them. In the city they supped on Tyrell bread and Tyrell fowl, and Sansa, too, had been starving. She knew how her hunger had paved the way for love.

Willas was just a stranger, she thought. A stranger with a mangled leg. And handsome siblings, but then the Imp had those. She'd thought, if she was free, she could be a good wife, a great lady, but the Hound had feared fire all his life, and maybe she was made with the same flaw; that terror having once entered her heart could never again be persuaded to leave it. Maybe what she had thought of as a sickness was closer to a scar, and she wouldn't be rid of its weight by fleeing the Lannisters who had given it to her, or the court, or the lands south of the Neck. She would carry it to the ends of the earth—her own deformity.

“Lady Sansa,” said Margaery.

They'd been speaking to her, she realized. Their voices sounded far away. “I'm sorry. I was...” Becoming complacent after all. Was that courage? More like madness.

“Drowsing,” said Cersei diagnostically. “Well, well. No doubt the coming season makes him happier to sweat between the sheets. And you,” she added. “I always thought the Stark words were dreary, but it's possible I misjudged you wolves. Tell me, was 'winter is coming' meant as a warning, before your father came south? Or did it stand as kingly pardon for the ways men stave off cold?”

 

That night, sleeping beside her lord husband, Sansa dreamed that she was in the scorched kingswood again, though unhorsed. She walked between trees like the ribs of dead dragons with her mantle trailing through soft charcoal mounds. When she and Margaery had ridden out with their hawks in the wood it had been under skies like slurried ash. But the dream took liberties: in it the sun picked out a pale cyvasse board on the broken forest floor, and remade the clouds over the bay to brocade and hammered gold. Unforgiving warmth beat down on her. Wrapped in her winter dress and woolen cloak she felt like one of the alchemists' more volatile elements, purifying at the bottom of a bone-ash crucible. She shed the cloak, hanging it on a branch, and then her falconer's glove and fur-lined boots.

She went on beneath boughs as sharp and naked as if autumn's last harvests had already been taken up. Scraps of charcoal stained her pinkened heels; she touched every tree trunk she passed, till her fingers were blacker than the hands of the dead. “Margaery,” she called—in the back of her mind she was conscious, positive, that Margaery was there too, or had been there, had ridden through the woods and towards the still corpse-strangled sea. Or had the bodies from the battle been dredged up, already; did the Blackwater flow clear and yellow under this late, sinking sun?

She collected her skirts and she ran.

“Margaery,” she tried, “I've lost my horse—” as though that were a reasonable claim, and Sansa a child, to be frightened by the sleek-eyed mares in her dead father's stables. She began again. “I've lost my _wolf_ ,” she said to the trees. “I've lost Lady.” But she had never climbed on Lady's back. If she'd lived, Sansa supposed, she would by now be large enough to mount. It was something Arya might have done. Arya should have, Sansa almost thought; should have escaped when Nymeria had, and clung to the thick dun fur of her neck like a bridle. But if Lady had grown to the size of an elk, Sansa would have thought of her first as a beloved pet, half a pup forever: a friend to coax and coddle, not to whip. Sansa had never been good at perceiving means of escape.

“It is nearly night,” she murmured. Sun flashed off the remaining leaves as though off sheets of foil, and made roses of the chanterelles, with their trumpets raised toward sky. When she held out her arm in front of her, light dappled the sallow skin of wrist and hand, forming an ornament of topazes—a latticework of garnets for a sleeve. She lifted her hand and out of the deepening blue came her merlin on dark-edged wings. Remembering the songs in which highborn ladies became falcons by enchantment, she would have examined him for a trace resemblance to her lost friend; but in his claws he clutched a scrap of bloody human hair. Sansa knew those curls.

Even so she took the shorn lock from him and looked closely at its length. She twined it between her knuckles, smooth as a skein of silk bought dear.

 

The sound of footsteps woke her. “Not her poor hair,” she said, sitting, and Shae stilled in the act of setting a breakfast tray on her bedside table, head cocked and waiting—the very image of a hunting bird.

“Is m'lady well?”

“Yes,” said Sansa, when she understood what she'd been asked. The pause had probably not made her more convincing, but Shae took her at her word, and dressed her silently. “Thank you,” said Sansa, and went up to the garden that grew over the roof of their apartments, where Tyrion sat amid fruitless vines, his sparse beard as pearled as the foliage by dew.

“My lord,” she said, “you'll catch your death.”

He jerked out of his reverie. “Sansa. I didn't expect to see you up here.” This bitterly, Sansa saw without emotion, although after a moment he seemed only, purely, thrown. “I was admiring the roses. They've had a most appropriate second bloom.”

She might have trusted him more if he hadn't had the same sense of humor as his father and the queen. Or, too, if he hadn't had the lichen-green left eye, now regarding her with pale curiosity. “You left your cloak below.”

“I didn't plan on a long visit. You can only gaze at so many blossoms before they start to blend into one. Besides, I was reading, and—”

He stopped and looked as though he'd just realized that he was alone, and talking to himself, like the madmen in her aunt's sky cells. Though they were, the two of them, barely three stories up.

“What were you reading, my lord?”

“History,” said Tyrion. He pushed himself off the low bench and stood, shivering. “What else is there? Well, prophecies, but they never let me take those out of the library.”

They were closer than they usually attempted waking. The shroud of mist had fallen from his face. She could see everything. He was her husband, but their marriage, unconsummated, revolved instead around the truth of all they had not done: her pity and his mercy, in the Tower of the Hand. One of them, at least, should have been ruthless. One of them should have blown the candles out.

She nearly told him then what Cersei'd asked. But it was one thing to think of the darkness in their wedding chamber, more pierced than dispelled by the sweet-smelling tapers, the deep wrought-gold lamps, and tell herself they had been wrong. That there was nothing to wait for, and no relief except in the blindness which night conferred. It was another to tell _him_. If his sister knew, his father knew; and he'd said, my lord father commands me. The only promise he'd made her that could be pointed to, and proved.

“My lord—”

“I descend,” said Tyrion, holding up a hand. “I hunt porridge, and will exsanguinate the honeycomb.” He tilted back his head to stare at her. “You're not dressed for the fog either, you know.”

“I'll follow you,” she said, and didn't watch him wobble down the ladder. He was wrong about the roses. Yellow and white and true-heart's red were arrayed like children among the thorns, and she was aware of each flower's particular beauty, the welter of petals and star chart of dew. So too she saw where corruption crept down the cusp of one pale bloom: brown holes drilled through its tender leaves by little famished worms.

 

She caught up with Margaery in an abandoned corridor, with no one to observe them but a statue of the Father from his niche on the wall. “Your Grace, I would speak to you.”

“Sansa,” said Margaery. She looked tired as well. Tireder perhaps than Sansa, who had dreamed so deeply. Her face was deftly painted, but under the lead and wheaten flour there hung detectable shadows, especially around her soft doe's eyes. Bruising—no. She was only weary. Without thinking Sansa had lifted a hand to touch one smudged gray eyelid, and Margaery turned her head, the artful twist in her long neck more resigned than reflexive. Her curls spilled down the scoop of one shoulder, and Sansa was reminded of the forest in her vision, the merlin with his fistful of hair. The fog had vanished together with the first hours of the day, and now the doors at the end of the hall let in a feverish breath of afternoon: light encroaching, with increasing cruelty, on the Red Keep's dim interior, and the cool black-tiled floor.

“What is it? Has something happened?”

“That was what I came to ask you,” Sansa said.

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

Sansa dropped her hand to her side. Margaery frowned at it. She was out of the sun's thorny white reach, but the brighter edge of her head glowed faintly, and burnished velvet gleams showed in her hair.

“How did you find me?” she said.

“Luck,” said Sansa. It wasn't true. She'd eaten with her husband and fled her sewing handmaidens, had claimed she went to pray alone in the godswood and then done nothing but walk where she could escape being seen. Part of her felt that she was still asleep. Her pulse beat like a finger at her throat.

“I don't often wander the castle alone,” said Margaery, self-consciously. “Truth be told, I'm surprised my attendants haven't flocked to us, we've stood here this long. Will you come with me?”

“Where are we going?” Sansa asked. “I can chaperone you, now I am wed.”

That teased a fast smile from the older girl. “You must tell Septa Nysterica that,” she said. “But let me watch when you do.”

Sansa looked at her.

“Maidenvault,” said Margaery. “You used to spend so much time there. I only ask an hour.”

So they went. Sansa had been half-afraid that the Queen of Thorns would come to greet them at the doors—or else would be holding court within, seated by a roaring hearth just as on the day they'd schemed to smuggle her away to Willas. Suppose the months since had been one nightmare, suppose she went to live it all again—but Margaery was irrefutably changed, draped in stiff cloth-of-gold and not in green; and when they climbed the steps the hall was empty, the fire burnt almost to embers, the table bare and rushes less than sweet. Margaery perhaps noticed her relief. “My grandmother prefers to take her midday meal outdoors. Especially on a day like this! Every one could be the last, she says.”

They were already rare in Winterfell before the king's party arrived. And that was two years ago, Sansa thought, not even autumn.

“We may have another warm spell. Or several.”

“Drops in the ocean,” said Margaery. She shook her head. “Mayhaps the cold will drive her back to Highgarden, but I hope not. Is that selfish of me?”

She had led Sansa there by the hand, walking so quickly that Sansa, though taller, had to hurry to keep up. Now she slowed before the entrance to her apartment, and released Sansa with an embarrassed shrug, as if to disclaim her strength. She didn't wait for Sansa's reply. “Come in,” she said, pushing open the door.

What lay inside shocked Sansa. Not the rich clutter of a loved only daughter, but silence, dust, and a coverless bed, white where the daylight dressed it as a maester might dress a wound. Margaery must have moved, already, to the apartment she would hold as queen. That would be where her much-harried attendants were. But when she lowered herself onto the vast bed it seemed a homecoming, with her profile as much a part of the room's bald order as the unvarnished wooden headboard. Even her sumptuous gown was bleached to cloth-of-pewter.

“Here we can talk,” she said.

It seemed no more discreet than talking in the corridor or the courtyard. There was no Butterbumps, to drown them out with ballads; nor was there the protection offered by little-girl chatter, as in the days when Megga and Alla and Elinor would have crowded in after them, spreading out their needlework on the tables and floor. But if they had been there Sansa could never have spoken at all.

“Yesterday,” she said, sitting by Margaery's side. “At supper. Why did Her Grace want me there with you?”

“She is your goodsister,” said Margaery.

Sansa said nothing.

Margaery's mouth twitched. “Her Grace knows how much we hoped to bring you away from here.” She seemed to mull her next words over. “How very much I wanted to show you Highgarden,” she said, less forcefully. “Yesterday was a reminder that I was overhasty—that for now, you're well served in King's Landing, where your devoted guardians can keep you from great harm.”

“She's very kind,” Sansa said.

“As kind as she is comely,” said Margaery.

“Did she say anything, after I took my leave?”

“That she thought you loved me less than once you did,” said Margaery, wistful as a song. “—was it true?”

Sansa tried to think of the real answer, then wondered why she bothered. “Of course not.” Only last night, I dreamed of you? I worry you're in danger? But Margaery was engaged to Joffrey and surrounded by Lannisters, as rooted in the capital as the roses on the roof; Margaery in danger was no prospect for augury. Besides, Sansa hadn't seen her hunted. In the dream, Margaery had been already lost, dying, her body defenseless to the savage beaks of the birds—her raw scalp stripped by hunger as the Hound's had been by flame.

“Don't leave,” said Margaery, taking her wrist. “Was that all you wanted to know? I've missed you terribly. You've been so busy, with your duties to your lord—no more than I have been. It's this dreadful wedding. I'm not even expected to do anything save attend, but I see my father and my grandmother come out of council with Lord Tywin every day, looking as if someone had died.”

Somebody did, thought Sansa. What had Margaery and Renly's wedding been like? She'd never heard anyone speak of it except in terms of armies.

“Let's stay here,” Margaery said. “Just for a little while. We can pretend we haven't any responsibilities, and hide from people with our best interests at heart. If we're very quiet, no one will guess we're here till after my grandmother returns. I didn't take everything when I moved to my new chambers. We'll play tiles, or—” She reached behind herself for a wooden bowl on the windowsill, and with a flourish extracted a comb. “Please,” she said. “It will be like when we met.”

“You want to comb my hair?” said Sansa stupidly.

“It's beautiful,” said Margaery. She had on a smile that thrust at Sansa as sunbeams did deep water. “Megga and Alla used to hog it, the brutes.”

“All right,” said Sansa. She shifted so that her back was to Margaery, a little awkwardly, and felt Margaery's fingers light atop the coiled braids. There was a minute in which the other girl did nothing except hunt for pins, after which time Sansa's hair began to tumble free: first in fine threads and then in thicker gouts, streaking red down the vague periphery of sight. She leaned forward, not really meaning to. The motion drew a veil over one eye. “Shh,” said Margaery. She tucked it back and placed her hand in the well betwixt Sansa's shoulders. Sansa straightened. “Brown's so dull,” Margaery murmured, close to her ear, as she set about arranging the tresses in one sheet. “Especially paired with brown eyes. What I'd give for a shade of auburn like yours!”

“It's from my mother,” said Sansa. She was thinking of Catelyn, who like Olenna loathed the cold, and who would still be trying to extract the last pith of summer, had they stayed north. When she was just turned four her mother had taken her out into the new-minted spring, irrespective of her father's warnings, and they stood shivering together in the godswood for the hope of a chary sun—white rays broken by leaves into a fall of silver coin. It was the most memorable of the few occasions on which Sansa saw her mother enter that wood. Even under the rusty buds of the heart tree, she'd smiled. Said: _First Men or not, it has the Tully look. You see?  
_

Margaery had stopped combing.

Sansa said, “She used to let my father brush it.” By the fire, in the evenings, her feet bare and poking out from beneath the mound of furs she claimed to need. Not in front of the children, but sometimes the children had come to them.

The silence behind her had deepened to a kind of ice. “It's all right,” Sansa said. “Thank you. Don't stop.”

The steady strokes resumed.

“Like copper wire,” said Margaery. “It drinks heat.” She had worked her fingers into the soft fluffy hair at Sansa's nape, her hand cupping the broad root of the skull.

“Your father did this for your mother,” she mused. “Does your lord husband—”

“ _No_.”

“Sansa,” said Margaery, and sighed. Sansa could smell the perfume on her near arms. If Margaery was selfish for wanting to keep her grandmother with her through the winter, how much moreso was Sansa, to wish for her mother's presence in captivity? She's with Robb, she thought. At Riverrun, where she belongs.

“In a way, I blame myself,” Margaery was saying. “If I hadn't been so eager to spirit you off to my home, the Lannisters wouldn't have needed to protect your claim like this. You're so young, Sansa, and the Imp...”

“It doesn't matter,” Sansa said.

Margaery shook her head. “You would love Highgarden. Someday, perhaps, we'll go there together, even if it must be as old married ladies.” She lifted a lock of Sansa's hair and wrapped it around her thumb, a gesture so familiar Sansa almost pulled away. Just a dream, she thought. Nothing more. Here she is. “I used to have a dog whose ears were close to this color,” Margaery said. “Roan. You could meet some of his puppies. Though they've grown up, of course. He was a spaniel, and wonderful at flushing out little birds.”

The progress of the comb had slowed. There weren't, Sansa suspected, many snarls left to tease apart. The bedmaids had been thorough, and half a day's lurking in hallways wasn't the kind of activity that bred knots.

“I was hunting pheasants with King Joffrey this morning,” said Margaery dreamily. “His Grace wanted to show off his archery. Though he didn't have a very good run, I'm afraid. He brought down a single hen."

“Was he angry?”

“Terribly. He wanted to find the fletcher and have him shot. Ser Kevan had to tell him that the castle's suppliers didn't—well—”

—didn't what? 

Didn't sign their arrows? Didn't live in the city, because they had foreseen the king's wrath?

Didn't sign, didn't live—

“Oh, Sansa.”

She said it in a different voice from the one she had been using, with the teeth of the comb pressed idly near the slant of Sansa's skull. Her smile had not yet faded, although it was a rueful voice.

“Sansa, you're shaking.”

She didn't sound surprised. Sansa looked at her knees. The outline of them beneath her skirt was luminously aquiver, like the floating peak of a candleflame. She put both hands on her kneecaps, but her hands were shaking too. “I'm sorry,” she said blankly, “I must be cold,” but Margaery put a finger to her lips and set the comb aside.

“Don't worry,” she said. “No one will find us.” She dropped a kiss on Sansa's temple, dry and chaste. Sansa turned her head blindly into the embrace, until Margaery's mouth dragged across her downcast eye. Margaery let her go. There was a feeling in the air like the insurmountable heat that extends far above a mere fire; and having withdrawn from the too-warm cup of Sansa's neck and jaw, Margaery fell back on the mattress, hair fanning out behind her head in a tawny panoply. Her upturned face was fair as vellum and her features richly inked. The sculpted corner of each clear eye, and the shadow cast by her nose, tracing the upper lip's slight curve—they seemed more nearly legible than the Imp's books, or the septry's hymnals.

Sansa understood that Margaery was inviting her into her confidence because she needed temporary respite. They had been friends, and besides the traitor's daughter was the one person at court with no power to betray, to whom anything could be said. The Hound had done it before Margaery, and the Imp, and Ser Dontos in the godswood. Still she felt she'd intruded on something as private as defeat: the transformation, unmarked and swift, of the warmhearted girl she thought she'd known into a soul that smiled at Joffrey's whims.

“Seven help us if his aim is as poor on our wedding night,” Margaery was saying, softer than before. “He'll have his mother executed for mismaking the weapon.”

Sansa had a sudden and awful vision of Tyrion's manhood, rising pinkly out of the hair between his legs. She fought her nausea. “Joffrey isn't—I'm sure—the prince is _so_ handsome, and—”

“Yes, he is.” Margaery frowned. “Sansa, you're blushing. I wouldn't have spoken of this to you before you were married, but surely...”

Her expression changed. Sansa could only imagine how high the blush had crept.

“Cersei told me,” said Margaery, after a moment. “I didn't believe it. She's not always reasonable, where Lord Tyrion is concerned.”

“She hates him.”

“Yes.”

“They hate each other,” Sansa said, unfolding one hand off her thigh and examining the welts left by her nails in the palm. Her cheeks stung, but she was all at once calmer than she'd been. It was a relief to know what Cersei thought. Even if it was terrible news, it was better to be certain.

“That too,” said Margaery. She was watching Sansa curiously. Sansa waited for her to ask what had prevented her from doing her duty, but when she spoke it wasn't a question. “You told him you didn't want him.”

“Yes,” Sansa admitted. Margaery had come to this second betrothal a maiden, it was said. She wondered if it was possible she hadn't wanted Renly. “How—?”

“Grandmother took charge of the negotiations for Highgarden's role in funding the wedding feast,” said Margaery. “My wedding feast. She said she'd never met a man so ill-suited to haggling. She said he could hardly bring himself to press the point when his very first offers were refused.”

Sansa found that she had run out of words. She could have said, _I didn't refuse him until he asked me to crave his touch_ ; she could have told Margaery that yes, her grandmother was right, that was the Imp, desperate for approval and any false peace. The world where he could have everything he wanted, and still cause no one pain. She closed her eyes and saw his face as it had appeared to her in the Tower of the Hand: its bulging forehead and raw hole of a nose, with the scar so cleanly red beside the coarser, unharmed skin. The way he looked at her had been eloquent and ugly, but it pleaded in two languages—the jet eye raging, the green eye starved. It would have been better to believe herself married to the man who'd made bad japes on the rooftop; who had been washed of his Lannister colors by hanging fog. But the Tyrion in her mind was Tyrion exposed, candle-lit, with blood rushing to darken his thick scar and twisted cock; and all the hair on his flat breast picked out in worthless gold.

“It might be better... not to delay any longer,” Margaery said. “Now that the queen knows too.”

She sounded reluctant. Did she not believe the thing herself, or did she merely think Sansa a dull student? Or was it the memory of her brother Willas, who might marry Sansa yet if an annulment could be gotten, but who would never bed the mother of the Imp's lawful heir? Sansa kept her eyes shut. She could hear the sure rhythm of Margaery's breathing, and the rasp of cloth on cloth. “You deserve better,” Margaery said, serious and a little sad. “But the Lannisters—”

“Your Grace, I am a Lannister.”

“I would help you,” Margaery said.

“There's no need.”

“Yet I want to,” Margaery said, and for as long as it took a shout's echo to fade, Sansa thought that she spoke without considering her family, or Winterfell. “There must be some way to ease the ordeal. You could pretend he was another man, someone out of a song—”

“That was his counsel,” said Sansa. “In the dark, he said, he could be the Knight of the Flowers.” She looked to where Margaery lay and saw her wince.

“But he couldn't,” she said, going on with it. She couldn't, ever, seem to make an end. “It isn't—he offered to refuse me. So that I would be wedded to Lancel instead. I didn't want to. Tyrion is half a man, but no husband I could have had would please me more.” There. That was almost right. No husband, certainly, that the Lannisters would have given her, no sandy-haired young men made old before their time by fire; not the pig boy or Ilyn Payne, both of whom Joffrey had threatened her with on the steps of the sept. Perhaps not anyone. Something had curdled in her when Tyrion said, _I know I am not the kind of husband young girls dream of—but neither am I Joffrey_. It was as though she'd seen, for the first time, the sum of all the hopes that might be granted Sansa Stark: and they amounted to no more than a husband who'd not beat her. Where did desire enter into that?

And by the same accounting, Margaery's future was the best coin to weigh happiness against. What a stupid girl I am, she thought quite lightly, heart bitter in her mouth.

“Sansa,” said Margaery.

Sansa said, “I will give myself to him. When next he asks.”

“He won't ask,” said Margaery gently. “You'll have to persuade him, now, or he'll think you've forced yourself to it.” Off Sansa's look: “Yes. But men are proud, and pride makes them fools.”

“I don't think I can persuade him of anything.”

Margaery's hand closed on her elbow, with some urgency. “Do you remember,” she asked, and paused as if to marshal her arguments. “Megga and Alla used to play a kissing game on this bed. For good reason! It's natural to be afraid, but with a little practice...”

“I've been kissed,” Sansa said flatly. She did remember the games, which had been sweet and silly, fast-devolving from kisses into gossip and puppyish shoves. Megga and Alla had bumped noses more than lips.

“Then kiss me. Show me.”

 _Will you have a song of me as well?_ “You're not Lord Tyrion,” said Sansa. “And I'm not a child. If you have no more need of me—”

Hurt rose in Margaery's eyes, circumscribed by movement: a shuttering of painted lids, the gaze unhooked from Sansa's mouth. There was something in her unease of the surf that daily broke on the black rocks around the bay—it formed and fell, and gone it was as if it'd never risen.

“I'm not the Imp,” she agreed. “So what is there to fear? One kiss, Sansa—it's a little thing. That's what I want to show you.”

She was still prone among the snowy sheets. She spoke like a woman on the verge of sleep, and in her body the only tense line was the raised wrist, the grip on Sansa's forearm. “Pretend _I'm_ Loras,” she said, with a reminiscing smile. “It should be less of a trial.” But it was impossible, with the failing light full on her head and throat, filigreeing the hair beneath her soft shoulders, to imagine that she was anything but herself, and someday queen.

Sansa leaned toward the expectant tilt of Margaery's face without feeling that she'd moved to do it—as though she had stayed perfectly still, while the mattress reared up like a drawbridge. “Well?” said Margaery, lips half-pursed; she resembled the puff fish Lady Olenna had once named Mace Tyrell, and if Sansa was angry she was at least no longer awed. She dropped her arm to bracket Margaery's shoulder and slid her free hand up Margaery's nape. None of it—not the shifting warmth of the other girl's skin, or the boldness with which she herself clasped it—upset the fierce tranquility that had swept over her. Don't you know, she wanted to say, don't you know that we're stuck, that when we scrape and scrounge for solace we dig ourselves deeper in; but they were two girls in a room with their lengthening shadows, and it seemed foolish to complain. Instead she dipped low and kissed her friend.

It would have been weightless, and brief, but Margaery's mouth opened with a sigh, and suddenly her knee had risen to brush the front of Sansa's skirt—her skirt drawn taut across her tucked and folded legs, but still it touched her strangely, its force diffused by cloth. She drew back. “Don't stop,” said Margaery, eyes shut and face quite empty. This close, Sansa could see the thick curl of her sharp-tipped brown lashes. It was easy to do as she was bid. Margaery tangled a hand in her hair and the remaining locks slipped down to screen them from sight, a last thin shelter. Margaery's mouth, by contrast, was plush under her own.

But not for long. She smoothed her knuckles over Sansa's ear and then sat up, not quickly, lipping little kisses from the corner of Sansa's unmasterable smile. “Laugh at me all you like,” muttered Margaery into her cheek, “but if you could see yourself—”

“You can't see me,” Sansa said, skating one thumb under the closed dark eye. She edged Margaery's jaw with her hand, and felt the stammering vein; felt Margaery defer rebuttal in favor of sucking her lip. It was a business far removed from the pecks swapped by Megga and Alla, and, farther, from what the Hound had taken from her when fire chased the night with emeralds. It might have frightened her, except it was so meager: closeness and clandestine intent, and the strangely prosaic light, which this close to evening flooded the small chamber, and parceled it into shadow and gold. There might have been no one there at all, though Margaery was moving down now to kiss, almost in innocence, the meeting of collarbone and throat, sliding from there to the bare hollow of her shoulder. Sansa turned her head until Margaery's springy hair tickled her nostrils, the scent and heat recalling nothing so much as the undergrowth of the kingswood before it had burned. She could stay here, she thought, doing little, Margaery's round thigh hitched across her lap; and thinking it she saw Margaery dead in the river, white and spattered with mud. Her cold head scored with half a hundred wounds. She saw herself wade through reeds that grew untroubled through corpses, to lie beside her dreamed-of sister, in the sluggish current.

Margaery's fragile-wet tongue was describing a cup at the base of her throat. “I must go,” Sansa told her, and when Margaery made a puzzled, questioning noise she wrapped her arms around her back and rested her chin, just for a moment, on the place where the shoulderblade curved out from the spine, like the image of a bird's wing in stone. All her bones a frieze of flight. “I must.” She was thirteen, Margaery sixteen, and there was that in Sansa which was tensed to mourn them both.

She heard Margaery talking, but it was like the babble of the river. She let go. She left the white wilderness of the bed and opened the door, and walked through it.

 

After that she remembered nothing for some time. When she came to herself again she had fled to the godswood, where fireflies were visible in the gathering dusk. Cersei, too, stood over her, lit at each edge with gold.

“You look like your father,” she said critically. “I never saw it.”

Sansa had never seen Cersei in the godswood. Ladies sometimes came during the day, to read to each other or stroll through the untarnished greenery, of which not much was elsewhere left inside the citadel. At night it was another matter—at night the best entertainments lay behind castle walls, and there was little to be seen beneath the canopy but the odd gleaming fox eye, the supple tail of a mouse among the roots. And Dontos.

Cersei must have grown tired of waiting for a response. “Is this where you meet him?”

“My—my father, Your Grace?”

“Don't be a fool.” Florian, Sansa thought, my Florian, but though she should have been terrified she felt nothing save regret. “Your lover.”

Sansa recoiled. “I haven't—”

“Do I look as though I care?” Cersei said dismissively, and reached to tuck a loose strand back around Sansa's ear. “If you'd done it as Joffrey's wife, I would have had you quartered, but by all means cuckold my brother. Though you should be more careful in your trysts. Anyone who saw you like this would know what you'd been doing.”

Only then did she realize that her hair was still unbound. “I didn't—I took it down, because it was so pleasant, and fell asleep—”

Cersei merely looked at her, amused. “Your maids came out here looking for you hours ago. You've missed supper with your lord, don't you know?”

“Oh,” said Sansa, “oh, no...”

“I shouldn't think he cares. No more than he cares that you leave his bed cold. That may change if he suspects your betrayal, of course. He has his pride.”

“Please, I never—”

“I won't tell him. Frankly, Sansa, I'm impressed. It's traditional to leave adultery till after the consummation. But I suppose it's not as if you have to worry about him ever discovering the condition of your maidenhead—unless this was but a way to steel yourself to your duty?” Her green eyes, lucid through gloom, held in their depths a trapped intelligence, and Sansa thought of King Robert and his bastards. Cersei had had them all killed, it was said.

There was an answer on her tongue: the one she should have given Margaery, and that the dream had tried to give her. She was alone, and that was all, that was all that had ever been granted her. Poor drunken Ser Dontos; she had almost forgotten his promise of escape. She remembered it now. “No,” she told the queen, meeting her gaze.

Cersei seemed satisfied. She squatted down on the grass before Sansa, skirts pooling around her in a ring of pale wool, and lifted Sansa's chin with one examining hand. “Lovely,” she said, rubbing her thumb on the pad of the lower lip, “especially like this. But it won't do. Turn around. _I'll_ put up your hair.”

It was so far from anything she could have imagined the queen saying that she thought she'd misheard. “Your Grace?”

“I was a maid once,” Cersei said, and Sansa saw that she'd been drinking, smelled wine's note on her moist breath. “Companion to princesses, and I had a gift for arrangement, though I say so myself. And I know how you wear it. Who else will do it for you, before your husband sees? You are an empty-headed little thing. Turn around.”

Sansa yielded, because flight could afford her nothing yet. She got off her knees and sat with her face towards the heart tree, her legs curled under her, and Cersei put unstable fingers against either side of her head. She was standing again. Her bare hands had crowned Sansa from a height. “Like this,” she said to no one, beginning the plait; and Sansa said yes, it was like that.


End file.
